So, after my little rant a few days ago, I’ve now gotten JavaScript::JSLint up and running. But that involves downloading a lot of Perl modules, and installing SpiderMonkey, which is a none too pleasant task. However, the Mac should already have JavaScript built in—JavaScriptCore, which is part of WebKit, which is used to build Safari.
So, I’ve spent an interesting couple of days learning Objective-C, Cocoa and nosing around the Apple developer documentation in order to see how to get at the JavaScriptCore. And, as far as I can see, you can’t.
The best I came up with is Using JavaScript From Objective-C. Which sounds nice and well, but from what I can make out, it’s predicated on having a window hanging around, which I want to avoid (I want a command line tool). It also doesn’t provide any interfaces to bind your own functions into the JavaScript interpreter.
Now, JavaScriptCore happens to be one of the Open Source parts of OSX. So, I can just download it, build my own wrapper, and so on. But it is annoying that I have to do so when the system comes with a perfectly good JavaScript interpreter of its own. Not only that, but it’s an alternative implementation to spidermonkey (based on KJS from KDE). And more implementations usually leads to a healthier ecosystem for a programming language.
In the meantime, anybody wanting (relatively) quick access to a lint for JavaScript on osx should probably look at javascriptlint instead. It still needs compiling, but it produces a single file which has no dependencies.
Mind you, I’m still glad at the time I’ve spent. Objective-C is rather nice (apart from the lack of garbage collection—refcounts make me nervous). And Interface Builder is the nicest GUI builder I’ve yet seen. Or at least it’s the only one that didn’t make me run away screaming.
Update: Looks like I missed JavaScript OSA. But that doesn’t look like it’s been updated in years.
Jabbering Giraffe 